You just sat through 10 minutes of video and the best parts you wanted to talk about and point to in your write-up are at 5:33 and 7:24 respectively, how do you do it?

The traditional way has been telling readers the timestamps and letting them fast forward (when possible) to the points, but now Google Video is letting us anchor link directly to videos on Google Video at the the timestamps with the following format:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=ID#ZZhXXmYYs

ID = the ID of the video
# = start the video permalink
ZZ = the hour where the clip takes place
XX = the minute where the clip takes place
YY = the seconds

A Few Examples
- My Incredible Hulk Review where I growl like the Hulk [0m4s = 0 minutes, 4 seconds into the video clip]
- Hulk review again where the review grade shows up on screen [1m0s = 1 minute, 0 seconds]
- Some dude creating a fart flamethrower (pictured above).
- Second Life video where CEO Phillip Rosedale explains that they “started in 2003 with 16 simulators [servers] online” [12m48s = 12 minutes, 48 seconds]
- Another Second Life video where Daniel Linden explains that eventually Linden Lab will open source the SL server software [01h10m20s = 1 hour, 10 minutes, 20 seconds]

Much needed feature
This feature serves multiple purposes: it lets people link to the best parts of videos and allows Google to determine search relevancy based on the text surrounding these permalinks. Google isn’t calling them permalinks, but I am. They are just making it sound like you can email people to your favorite spots.

Will be interesting to see how this improves Google video searches relevancy over time. Google Video has not been a significant competitor to YouTube yet, but they are improving.

Disclaimer: I own GOOG stock.

Update 6/2/07 9:45am PST: Updated the instructions above to include hours as well as an example showing usage.

Here’s something a little different to review: an online web audio/video contest site called Bix. It’s currently in the dreaded invite-only status and I’m not sure how many invites one can send out, which I’ll get back to in a little bit. You can also sign up at the site for an invite like I did. It took about a day for an invite to arrive to my inbox. Clicking the coded link in the invite email will then allow registering. You know the drill.

First, the bad news: Bix doesn’t work with Firefox yet. So you either suffer through the Internet Explorer version with ActiveX plugin or move over to Safari or Camino with Java. I didn’t test the Safari or Camino with Java hookup, but did put the ActiveX through several recording sessions. You will need a web camera if you want record video and similar to the Grouper shoutouts feature you can do it right through the browser with no additional software.

Karaoke anyone?
Once registering for Bix, login and search for contests to view and vote on, enter or create your own contest. Contests range from lipsync to static pictures to Karaoke where you pick from the built-in database of songs and then Karaoke on camera. I’m not sure whether or not these Bix are licensed for this, but I hope the answer is yes.

The karaoke functionality would be great if it worked completely during my testing. I tried recording Indian Nation by Paul Revere & The Raiders at least three times and it wouldn’t complete the upload process without errors. There was no way to save the video locally so I basically lost each recording take (very frustrating). When uploading Bix kept erroring out with “your title is too long. Maximum length 50 characters.” Strangely, there was no input field for a title so I don’t know have any idea what was up there. The support forum is a ghost town, no hope there.

Actually recording, previewing and re-recording through the browser worked ok. The lyrics spin across a mini-teleprompter in the browser at the right moments during the song. The song selection is a little suspect, unless you are a Beatles, country or pop fan with a few hundred songs to choose from maybe. On the Bix site it says they are working on expanding the song database.

Thumbs up your way to $7,500 USD
There is a 60 second comedy contest where the first prize is $7,500 USD for the most thumbs up votes, with no number of entries limit. Looks like I was the first one brave — or stupid — enough to enter and upload.

Fortunately, the comedy part worked the first take. Just add a title and short description and click the upload button. After a couple minutes — yeah, kind of slow — it uploaded the video and added to the searchable database. I noticed that the most recent recorded video shows up on the homepage for added exposure. I took a screenshot that shows me no the homepage for my comedy entry.

If you have some comedic genius just itching to get out, $7,500 for a few minutes prep and work is well worth a try. What do you have to lose besides your video dignity? I entered with not one but two videos: Whistle Drink and One dollar, 41 cents. Note: those links will only work once you are registered for the site, which I’m happy to send you an invititation if I can for the rest of July 2006 or until I run out of invites, if you leave a comment below. The invite will be sent to the email you use in your comments.

And the audience votes, American Idol style
It didn’t take very long to receive my first thumbs down vote. And thumbs up vote too. And more came. And shocker, I attracted one fan. Maybe I can quit my dreams of being a writer and become the next Dave Chappelle? Just a few more fans and I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the paparazzi.

From the user side, you can view videos, listen to audio-only productions, leave comments and vote thumbs up or thumbs down and of course invite your friends to check it out.

If Bix works out the quirks and technical glitches — of which I encountered several — they might have something more interactive than … well, more interactive than YouTube until YouTube decides to add similar contest features and functionality. I’m kind of surprised YouTube hasn’t done something like this already.

Bix is similar to hitting the Karaoke bar without the designated driver and headaches and scarred memories the next morning. The headaches being for those who need a little spiritual lubrication motivation to get up on stage and torture real singers William Hung style, but I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.

It’s too bad the Karaoke upload function wouldn’t work for me because I think my comedic, clumsy rendition of Indian Nation complete with fire, smoke, handcuffs and Tabasco sauce would have made The Raiders proud. Maybe I’ll try again on the Mac with iSight someday.

A new Think Secret rumor suggests iTunes will be doing movie rentals instead of movie sales as has been previously believed and that this will be announced during CEO Steve Jobs keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference starting Monday August 7.

Assuming this rumor is true and I seriously have doubts, if the rentals are priced like Movielink, Cinemanow, etc., it’s going to tank. Nobody wants to pay $3-5 per new movie rental online, even through iTunes (which this name continues to sound bizarre for non-music media, when are they going to change it?). Haven’t enough netizens voted with their wallets on pricing? Movielink has been up for sale for awhile and there doesn’t appear to be flocks of interested suitors.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is moving laboriously toward a model that netizens do like with deals like Guba which allow burning movies purchased online to a single DVD. The Cave currently costs $13.99 via Guba, which is still a few dollars more than we saw the DVD at Best Buy on sale for $9.99 + tax. TV series like Babylon 5 Season 1 cost $1.79 per episode via Guba for a total of $41.17 (and each episode must be purchased individually) and this includes no extras/special features (right?) or packaging. Amazon is selling the Babylon 5 - The Complete First Season (affiliate) DVD for $43.93 with all the goodies and packaging. It’s encouraging to see the movie deal online getting closer, but I will continue to bang the drum that the deal online must be priced less to be successful, just like buying music. Collectors and fans want the packaging and cover art.

If this alleged movie rental pricing should be priced more than $1.99 like the TV to videos in iTMS, why pay that much when you can get an unlimited movie rental plan (2 movies at a time) at places like Hollywood Video for $27/month? Even with gas prices and travel factored in, if you rent more than say 12 movies a month (that’s a mere six trips to the movie store) the convenience factor isn’t worth it.

If Apple were to put all movie rentals — new, old, etc — on par with buying iTunes song (99 cents each) then movie rentals via iTunes could be seriously disruptive. I don’t see that happening, though. If this Think Secret movie rental rumor has any legs and again, I doubt it, then they are going to make them too expensive. I think Steve Jobs should keep fighting for $9.99 (or less) pricing for all online movies with an option to burn to DVD like Guba.

Whatever actually happens in the coming days, it’s encouraging to see Hollywood moving a little closer to what online consumers desire.

Hat tip to LUX.ET.UMBRA

Have you checked out the return of Rocketboom v2.0 with new “interim host” Joanne Colan. If you haven’t caught her on MTV then the first thing you’ll notice is her strong accent.

I’ve followed Rocketboom more closely since the 1.0 breakup than ever before during 1.0 so my frame of reference and experience will not be nearly as good as hardcore RB fans. In fact, a search at Hmm for rocketboom yielded a mere eight results, half of them over the last two weeks.

I thought this return episode was OK. They could have done more with the tomato throwing (an attack of the killer tomatoes clip would have been cool).. Comments thus far seem overall guarded to positive on the RB site. There is a request in the episode telling former host Amanda Congdon she is welcome back “any time.”

I won’t spoil the rest of today’s video, go ahead and walk the plank and let us know what you think in the comments/trackback below. I’m interested in reading what you think, with the exception of the guy out there spamming his blogspot blog with ‘rocketboom updates’ (including on the RB video comments today).

Not as promised, Rocketboom still isn’t back on air with a new host. It was supposed to be on Monday but then that slipped back to Tuesday and now could be Wednesday or later? They aren’t saying.

Here is the message on the site from Drew:

Rocketboom was obviously very dependent on Amanda’s role. Since she left so suddenly, I have tried to get the episodes up and running as soon as possible, though I am not comfortable with the way they are going yet.

In the meantime and in the spirit of fairness you’ll see a video below of Andrew Baron telling his side of the Rocketboom story at Eli Singer’s CaseCamp last week. Viewer beware it’s about 28 minutes long.

As promised, I’m not going to comment on the Rocketboom drama stuff any more until there is a resolution or new revelation in the events, but I do remain curious to see — as are many others — what the new Rocketboom will look/be like. Actually I’m glad to see that they are taking their time and not just rushing out some clone of the old rocketboom with a new host. The rumored (and confirmed?) new host is former MTV video jockey Joanne Colan. They even have a little v2.0 graphic. This is one of those rare times that I think a main version upgrade makes sense.

I have doubts about a former-anything but I suppose Congdon was a former-something so perhaps that’s the way it goes in show business. If Rocketboom is smart, and they have to be to get to the success level they were at until things started breaking down (and some are saying they are more popular right now than before), then they will go a different direction. Really, I hope that’s what they are trying to do. The sliding catcher/anchor outfit routine video today is a start … of sorts.

After posting about Amanda Congdon’s video exiting Rocketboom yesterday updates continued to roll in and the story contained more twists and turns than an episode of The Twilight Zone.

I kept adding the new information as updates, but now Amanda has added a new post entitled “For The Record” which deserves a completely new post on its own. So I can keep the sequence of events straight in my own head, I’ve written things down while it is still fresh in my mind.

First, let’s review the sequence of events as they unfolded yesterday — for me, anyway:

1) discovered Amanda Congdon’s soon to be famous ‘Unboomed’ video, thanks to a pointer by Vallewag. You can watch it below.

At the beginning of the video Amanda explains the following:

I’m actually here … to … tell you guys because I think it’s so important to be transparent with Rocketboom viewers.

2) I blogged the news that Amanda was leaving Rocketboom and quoted what she said in the video, also linking to a quote by Valleywag about the situation.

Amanda claims she was a 49% partner, while Andrew Baron owned 51% of Rocketboom

Based on the information in the video, I didn’t feel I needed to go all Geraldo and get the other side of telling one person’s side of the story. Hey, that’s what updates and future blog posts are all about. I still don’t and wouldn’t change a thing that happened yesterday, despite Dave Winer’s finger wagging at all blogger coverage of the event “so far” characterizing as: “has been pretty one-sided and totally shoddy and unfair.” Please somebody, anybody read my original post (sans updates) verbatim and tell me where what was written was unfair and shoddy considering the information I had at the time? I think my post was balanced and dealt with the facts as I saw them at the time.

Anyway, I hit publish to that blog post yesterday and then continued reading other posts in my RSS aggregator.

3) Soon I saw a techmeme post in my aggregator leading to other posts about Amanda Unboomed. I followed a post by j.botter thanks to techmeme that shared a link to at that time the only public comment I’d seen telling the other side of the story by Amanda’s partner, Andrew Baron, listed in the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

4) I added an update to the original blog entry at 10:34am PST containing the following new information:

TWIST #1
Andrew Baron indicates in that Yahoo Groups post that he learned about Amanda leaving Rocketboom the same way the rest of us did: via her Unboomed video (shown above). Andrew’s quote verbatim:

I have just learned of this myself from watching Amanda’s video. I guess it is in fact over.

I’m not sure what I will do - I have no one else to take Amanda’s place and haven’t really ever imagined Rocketboom without her except for the past week as everything has been up in the air.

This information doesn’t necessarily dispute Amanda’s assertion that “Andrew doesn’t want me to be his partner any more” although it is a rather significant change in the storyline.

Rumor #1: j.bott posted on his blog the speculation that the real reason Amanda left Rocketboom might have to do with a personal relationship gone sour:

Andrew and Amanda were apparently an “item” until recently, and it’s being speculated that a bad breakup is the root cause of Amanda leaving the show. I’d assumed from Amanda’s farewell video that she’d been fired by Andrew, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

5) Shortly after publishing the update, Chuck Olsen would stop by in the comments to refute the romantic rumor #1: “Amanda and Andrew were not romantically involved.”

My request for Chuck to provide more information to backup his assertion went (and remains) unanswered. On Chuck’s blog, he had the following message:

I’ve spent the last 4 days trying to get Amanda and Andrew to come together, but… it’s too far gone.

Note: As I write this, I notice Chuck has added more information in the comments section of his blog:

It’s remarkable that about a dozen people knew about this, and not a single one of them leaked it. Amanda posting this video was the first public announcement. We were trusted to keep it “in the family” so to speak. I guess we have no obligation to do so now, but my first instinct isn’t to spill my guts about everything — my first instinct is to (a) mourn, and (b) prevent the spread of false rumors.

6) More comments to my blog post, including one by Dave Coustan who claimed to have received an email from Andrew Baron which adds yet another twist.

TWIST #2
Writes Andrew Baron in an alleged email to Dave Coustan with permission to reprint:

We wanted her to get to Hollywood to pursue her personal opportunities as soon as possible, but her demand to move this week without waiting any longer, without a justification, and without an adequate proposal for a plan for how the show itself would work, we were unable to uproot Rocketboom from NYC at this time.

7) At this point Amanda’s claim on video — in her own words — to “be more transparent” was starting to crack and I added the information above in an update at 12:35pm PST, along with the following statement:

Kinda odd if true that Amanda didn’t just say this in her video blog instead of making it sound like a split that wasn’t amicable. I mean, in the spirit of “transparency” after all (sarcasm). Something isn’t adding up here.

While writing and publishing the update, my blog post received a trackback from darkmoon confirming the romance side, but which would shortly be struckthru with the message:

Oops. My bad. Amanda and Mario, not Amanda and Andrew. My fault on the fact check, Amanda. My apologies. Andrew Baron is the business partner and “producer”.

There appears to have been no romantic involvement between Congdon and Baron. Rumor #1, which started as far as I can tell with a blog post by j.bott is bogus. Note: he did use the word “speculation” but didn’t cite any sources for this information.

9) As the day moved on, a couple more events unfolded and frankly I lost interest in following the coverage. I read all of the posts that showed up in my aggregator and most of the ones that appeared on techmeme. Later in the day I’d add a final update to the post at 4:56pm PST which covered Netscape and Weblogs Inc pointman Jason Calacanis blog post offering Congdon a job to be the daily Netscape top news anchor, complete with her owning the content after a short window of time. Jason also pointed out that Time Warner / AOL had a nice new studio in Beverly Hills. Jason made it sound like Amanda could name her price. Seemed like a great gig but too bad it was AOL.

Also in the update, as mentioned earlier was a link to Dave Winer’s post claiming he had insider knowledge to the communication breakdown between Congdon and Baron. Specifically Dave wrote: “it’s totally unfair to say that Amanda was fired.” In Dave’s post he links to mashable, techcrunch, rexblog, nial kennedy and whatsnextblog in a sentence that reads: “Yet many of the bloggers covering the event say she was fired.”

Dave is correct that many people did lead with Amanda being fired. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones here that didn’t. My title: Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon rocketed out the door sort of says it all to me, even today after the twists and turns.

10) Later in the day a message appeared on Rocketboom, unsigned that confirmed that Amanda Congdon had actually quit

TWIST #3
Official message on rocketboom.com says Amanda quit, here is partial text (emphasis mine):

Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.

We wanted to meet her demands to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. While we continue to remain with open arms, Amanda has in fact quit and left Rocketboom. So sadly, we bid Amanda adieu and wish her all the best.

Rocketboom goes on.

Andrew Baron, the founder and creator of Rocketboom, will stay with the company in New York and will continue to produce and direct the show. We are in the daunting process of recruiting a replacement for Amanda.

Clearly at this point all hopes of transparency in the beginning — as Amanda had promised in her video — were shattered. I thought this story had pretty much run its course, thinking maybe there would be some sort of joint statement.

No way.

11) Last night Amanda Congdon fired up a detailed blog post mentioned at the top of this post as “For The Record” where she delves even deeper into the story, leaving absolutely no room for guessing (ahem, Dave Winer).

TWIST #4
Congdon identifies Chuck Olsen as “The Mediator.” Remember, Chuck was the guy who refuted Rumor #1.

TWIST #5
Congdon recounts a letter allegedly sent by Baron on June 25 that she claims to have responded to on the same day. See her very first red text response to the opening sentence:

Baron: Dear Amanda, this is my last attempt to reach out and let you know I really wish you would stay.

Congdon: Andrew, you fired me.

We now officially have a he said, she said. Congdon claims she was fired, Baron says she quit. It has to be one or the other, so which is it?

TWIST #6
A bizarre explanation by Congdon explaining her video (see above) yesterday:

I had hoped to keep things civil, and thought my video message to the Rocketboom viewers was very neutral. I felt the need to communicate with the RB audience, without getting into the nitty-gritty of “he said, she said”. Dirty laundry is not attractive. That said, ALL the facts, at this point, based on Andrew’s actions, need to be presented.

Transparency includes dirty laundry, yes? Transparency includes ALL the facts, yes? This paragraph makes Congdon look very bad. She should never have trotted out that bogus “transparent” line in her video. Her video was clearly intentional spin made to look like there was a “neutral” situation that clearly wasn’t neutral.

TWIST #7
Congdon claims that Baron agreed to allow her to work on Rocketboom from LA and then reneged:

Baron: Since you have claimed that you are moving next week, and because you have never suggested a plan for how this move can integrate into Rocketboom, and because you have already said your goodbye, I get the message and will now move on myself the best I can.

Congdon: Andrew, see our long term and extensive plan described above.

And, as it turns out, I cannot move to LA because our plan was for me to be engaged in, and compensated for, work on Rocketboom there. Since you will no longer allow that, I have no source of income and therefore cannot move.

Does Congdon have a written or (gasp) verbal agreement for the 49%?
The major bone of contention going forward could be whether or not a written or verbal agreement spells out the 49% that Congdon allegedly owns [Update: in the comments of Congdon’s post she indicates that “My contract with Andrew IS in writing, is filed with the bank, and still stands.”]. I’m getting the feeling that TWIST #8 is going to involve lawyers. Let’s hope Chuck Olsen is wrong and it’s not too far gone because this will end up in court and for both parties sake a written agreement with partnership percentage will be a lot less messier in the courts. Verbal agreements are very dicey.

I think the way this whole thing went down was shameful and amateurish. It’s like a bad relationship on the Brady Bunch instead of professional. It is true that part of the draw of videoblogging is the amateur angle, but from a business perspective the “transparency” displayed here — or lack thereof when promised initially (by Congdon) — has been terrible.

Yes, we’ve gotten more transparency after criticizing but I don’t know what or who to believe at this point. I think as business people both Congdon and Baron handled this situation miserably.

What can they do now to fix things?
They aren’t asking my advice, but if they were I’d tell them to do the following ASAP:

- release a joint statement on rocketboom.com along with videoblog with both of them on camera talking about the situation perhaps with The Mediator Chuck Olsen.
- announce who the replacement host will be, if there is one. If there isn’t one, then announce that Amanda Congdon will remain as the host until a suitable replacement is found
- get some lawyers to draw up a formal contract if one isn’t in place as to who owns and controls what percentage of Rocketboom. If no agreement can be reached, then set court dates to resolve.
- But in the meantime the show must go on. It seems to me the priority of things here is completely out of whack. Rocketboom.com should be the priority not some he said, she said exit drama. Get the show back on and start repairing a damaged relationship with the viewer base that will inevitably involve the most passionate viewers taking sides. I’m not taking any sides here except to say that I think Congdon’s video yesterday was poorly executed. The fact that she admits it wasn’t the whole truth and played upon being “transparent” with viewers makes me trust what she says less going further.

Now I’m done with this story as far as posts here at Hmm until there is some major revelation and/or solution. We can continue this discussion in the comments below. Clearly these folks can use some good business advice right about now from somewhere. If you were a business advisor for these two, what would you advise them to do?

Wow, this one surprises me, especially considering it’s Rocketboom, a video blog that is arguably the shining star in the video blogging scene. Amanda Congdon goes on video in the spirit of “transparency” to explain that she owns 49% of Rocketboom and Andrew Baron owns 51% and that Baron doesn’t want to be partners with her any more.

“And that’s just something I’m gonna kind of have to live with”, says Congdon in her brief, much less cheerful than normal video explanation of the conflict.

Valleywag ponders:

Watch her farewell video, and notice how much realer Congdon feels when she speaks off the cuff. Either this is the natural tone Baron felt she was missing, or it’s a hoax and Congdon’s finally learned how to act.

This seems real, folks. If it’s an April Fool’s joke in July, it can only get worse. Is this a sign of the talent getting too much glory or something less obvious? I think most people related Rocketboom to Amanda Congdon and not Andrew Baron and sooner or later this was bound to cause friction. Partnerships aren’t easy, especially when egos are involved. I’m sure Amanda Congdon will land on her feet doing another video blog elsewhere (or show up on the real TV or in movies), but this could serve as a cold reminder that if you are talent and don’t own an equal or controlling interest in a show that breaks through, you can always be shown the door.

I think this also shows how fragile video blogging is as a career. I would expect Scoble [here], Rice [here] and others to comment on this news very soon.

If the top videoblog out there can’t have a harmonious relationship when some reports claim they are pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week, how can much smaller video bloggers carve out a profitable niche? Purely from a business standpoint, I bet hollywood and the TV networks are lapping this news up like thirsty dogs.

Update 10:34am PST j. botter points to a comment allegedly made by Andrew Baron in the Yahoo Videoblogging group which suggests this was a surprise to him too. j.botter doesn’t think the show will survive without Amanda and adds a possible romantic angle twist to the story:

Andrew and Amanda were apparently an “item” until recently, and it’s being speculated that a bad breakup is the root cause of Amanda leaving the show. I’d assumed from Amanda’s farewell video that she’d been fired by Andrew, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Meanwhile PR maven and hyperbole king Steve Rubel makes an absurd comparison to Lennon and McCarthy McCartney. As popular and successful as Congdon (and behind the scenes Baron) are in a small, but growing niche, it’s ridiculous to compare this in any context to the Beatles breaking up. C’mon Steve.

Update 12:35pm PST: Dave Coustan stops by in the comments below saying he received an email from Andrew Baron with permission to publish (similar story reported to Mathew Ingram) that indicates Amanda was moving to Los Angeles and would be moving on without Rocketboom. Kinda odd if true that Amanda didn’t just say this in her video blog instead of making it sound like a split that wasn’t amicable. I mean, in the spirit of “transparency” after all (sarcasm). Something isn’t adding up here.

Update 4:56pm PST: Jason Calacanis offers Amanda a chance to enter AOhell first class through the Netscape doorway, with paid bennies and all. Nice offer but likely a sucker’s gig, even with the killer studio. Jason should probably get back to wooing the netscape.com faithful annoyed by the switch to a digg clone.

Meanwhile, Dave Winer claims he has seen some behind the scenes conversations between Congdon and Baron and “it’s totally unfair to say that Amanda was fired.” Dave goes on to bash the blogosphere: “the reporting by the blogosphere so far has been pretty one-sided and totally shoddy and unfair.”

Update July 6, 2006 8:35am PST: There are now hundreds of posts out there about this situation, and this morning I summarized the heresay, facts, twists and rumors in chronological order in one post here, which is also trackbacked in the comments below.

I signed up for the P2P video sharing site Grouper clear back in November 2004 (my Grouper profile shows me as “old school level 5″ whatever that means). Didn’t write anything about Grouper at the time as it was one of those demos where I looked at it, downloaded, installed and then decided it wasn’t something I’d use or thought many others would use very often.

With the explosion of video sites a la YouTube, it’s forcing me to reevaluate the whole “what others would use very often” scene. Every week I see, use and try several new sites/services/programs and since there is limited time for me to write about them I try and choose the ones where I see some possible real world application. I will mention the ones I don’t review here (or elsewhere) sometimes in the Hmm Quickies.

So why bother with Grouper now, some 1 1/2 years later?
While I still don’t see Grouper being in the same league as YouTube, there is more here to make their site and service attractive:

1. Grouper has added some new features which make it less dependent on downloading and using their Windows only (.NET) P2P client for sharing the videos. In fact, I didn’t install the new version of Grouper for writing or demoing anything in this post.
2. They added post to blog functions, but only for MySpace, Friendster, Blogger and Wordpress.com. I’d like to see all video sharing sites having post to blog functionality. And these post to blog functions should cover the half dozen or so primary blogging platforms (hosted and non-hosted). In their official grouper blog, the headline — “A new easy way to post video to your Wordpress blogs” — is a bit deceptive. It’s not post to any Wordpress blog, it’s post to any wordpress.com blog. Big difference and while I’m sure it’s not intentional, they might want to add on the .com part. Too bad it doesn’t allow post to any Wordpress-powered blog (does it?) or we could integrate here once in awhile. Maybe that function is/will be coming? It should be.

Video shoutouts
To illustrate just how much Grouper has gotten away from being a Windows-only/primarily gig to being open to multiple OS, they’ve added a feature called Video Shoutouts which can be recorded right in the browser using Flash 8. To demo I created my first Grouper video shoutout using an iSight camera on a Mac inside Firefox (shown at top of this post).

If I embedded the video above correctly it should not autoplay. Unfortunately, when I posted this a little bit ago to my test wordpress.com blog it does start autoplaying on page visits and I didn’t see any configuration to turn that off (?). Make this requested change #2 please, Grouper. Netizens do not like unexpected autoplay.

But will people actually use audio/video for comments?
I’ve always liked the concept of users being able to leave comments in audio/video. For one, there’s no denying who left the comment when you have a face and voice to go along with the name. Text comments when they can be anonymously left leave you wondering sometimes. Also, they are more personal I think simply by the nature of combinging audio/video.

Clear back in 2002 I created a messageboard system where a targeted group of webmasters could record and leave audio messages. Many people commented how cool it was and were excited by the technology and possibilities but very few actually used the service and the experiment ultimately died. I remember hearing all sorts of excuses like “I don’t have a microphone” and “people won’t like my voice.”

It is this negative experience that leaves me skeptical. Especially because these people weren’t just unconnected net newbies, these were webmasters. People who you would expect to have above average knowledge of the web. If one can’t get this group actually using audio comments, I’m not sure about audio and video comments with the masses four years plus later.

Video is definitely on the rise, but I wonder how much of the interest in video is an interest in pirated content and not homebrew and/or video blogging? The video bloggers talk like the next greatest thing on the web is going to be video blogging.

With this in mind I didn’t see many — actually I didn’t see any — video comments being left on the Grouper.com site (I’m sure there are some), even though the process of leaving them doesn’t require any downloads or special software (beyond Flash which is installed on the majority of computers out there). Yes, you do need a webcam and microphone and do need to authorize the Flash object to connect to your webcam and microphone to record the actual video comment. Recording is as basic as pressing a button to start recording, watching the 3..2..1 and then saying what you have to say, and then pressing stop when you are done.

8 days of TV fasting
As I write this our family has now been without television for 8 days. If you’d like to guess how many days we’re going to make it without TV, enter your guess in days as a comment here. If we get at least 10 guesses (one per person please) before we give in to the TV demons, then we plan to make an official Hmm contest out of it and kick in at least one prize.

Is it video week yet?
Wow, this week I’ve used a webcam a couple different ways [see using webcam as inventory bar code scanning tool]. Maybe I am being bitten by the video/webcam bug after all?

Can you think of some other useful ways to use a webcam? Feel free to share your webcam ideas below. How much do you use your webcam? Do you have one? Why? Why/not?